“[﻿Every species on Earth] ﻿has a characteristic distribution on the Earth’s land surface… But in every case, that distribution is in practice a single frame from a very long movie. Run the clock back only 10,000 years, less than a blink of an eye in geological time, and nearly all of those distributions would be different, in many cases very different. Go back only 10 million years, still a tiny fraction of the history of life on Earth, and any comparison with present-day distributions becomes impossible, since most of the species themselves would no longer be the same.” --Professor Ken ThompsonTo most of us in the Bay Area, the particular species of the trees which make up our spectacular forests are of little consequence. We value their outcome—beauty, shade, animal habitat, and the idyllic, other worldly Edens created beneath their towering canopies—irrespective of the geographical origin of the trees’ long ago ancestors.

However, a small group of individuals with a zealous, irrational hatred of certain species of trees—Eucalyptus, Monterey Pine, and Acacia trees—have gained the cooperation of our public officials to turn some of the most stunning open spaces in the Bay Area into environmental war zones, leaving those of us who do not subscribe to their narrow agenda to watch with sorrow and great heartbreak as decades-old, and in some cases, century-old trees planted by Oakland’s earliest residents fall to the chainsaw; as animals are displaced, harmed and poisoned; as beautiful, lush forests are reduced to hillsides of barren stumps; and, as people and animals are exposed to toxic chemicals which public officials admit are a public health hazard. It is, in a word, madness.

When the means by which a particular end must be sought are so cruel and destructive, common sense compels a closer look at the goal itself. If the decimation of pristine forests and the deliberate poisoning of wildlife and people in the region is the only way to achieve a stated end—in this case, the eradication of trees unfairly maligned as “non-native”—then the end itself must be inherently problematic, even dystopian. And when the goals of the City of Oakland, the EBRPD, and UC Berkeley are considered in light of what we know about the ever-evolving and changing nature of life in Earth, it becomes clear that they have not only declared war on the byproducts of nature—certain plants and animals which have traveled or been transported from their place of origin—but on the workings of nature itself: migration, natural selection, evolution, change. Those pursuing the eradication of East Bay forests and the public officials who defer to them cite phantom problems where none in fact exist; instructing us to not only regard inevitable natural forces as sinister and threatening and gentle, carbon sequestering, habitat creating, shade giving, majestic trees as pernicious and evil, but to embrace often catastrophic and self-destructive means to reach an elusive and impossible goal: holding nature in stasis to preserve or return a region to a particular and favored but ultimately arbitrarily chosen moment in time.